Deus Extra: The Nameless Mod Hits 1.4

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With the triumphant release of the 1.4 patch, The Nameless Mod total conversion for Deus Ex has finally been announced complete, a whopping seven years after its inception. Seven years! What were you doing seven years ago? I think I must have been a tiny baby dressed in hammer pants, struggling to beat my brother’s Galaga high score. And yet these were seven years well spent- with 13,000 lines of recorded dialogue, 20 new weapons, 100 tracks of new music and a playtime of between 15-20 hours, The Nameless Mod is by far the largest Deus Ex mod ever made and a bizarre one at that.

The Nameless Mod (henceforth TNM) is set within a strange parallel universe interpretation of a real-life Deus Ex community forum, making its title a very clever pun. TNM re-imagines messageboards as virtual worlds where all the politics and cults of the boards become more literal, and your character is called upon to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a moderator. It could well be the nerdiest detective story ever written. Or, to let the mod’s developers Off Topic Productions describe it: “TNM is different from other Deus Ex mods because they usually start off with a good idea for a game, and then ruin it by not including voice acting and having horrible writing and character development. However, with TNM, a very lame idea has been implemented well, with decent writing and believable characters.”

An exception to this rule is of course Kieron’s baby The Cassandra Project, which was a good idea only partially ruined by its small team being utterly overwhelmed by the work involved.

But to say TNM is somehow hobbled by its setting isn’t quite right. It’s true that the characters and references in Forum City often seem written for someone other than you, but they also lend heart and a curious sense of place to the game because the team behind TNM wrote what they knew. When incidental details are thrown in about one moderator not liking another, or you learn why someone dislikes the forum’s newbies (in the game an impoverished gang of dispossessed and simple folk) it always makes total sense. The world, inexpertly presented at times, still impresses through being ambitious and hugely developed.

It surpasses Deus Ex at times, if we’re talking density. Certain conversations in the game give you the chance to ask about a half-dozen different people or topics, chats are always spiking in different directions depending on your decisions, there’s a wealth of private emails to be read and the whole mod is littered with PDAs, books and newspapers to be browsed if you’re in the mood. While this shouldn’t be wholly surprising for a game made by the Deus Ex community, I even prefer the structure of The Nameless Mod to Deus Ex. Instead of the game tugging you by the hand from locale to locale and informing you of your duty like some demanding, nano-enhanced mother, TNM opens by giving you your mystery (find where this mod went, unravel the conspiracy) and Forum City is soon yours to explore in its entirety, its inhabitants yours to interrogate, its many vents yours to kick in. TNM doesn’t concern itself too much with pacing, instead leaving you to deviate and nose around the game world as you see fit. I love it for that. As a detective story it feels less like you’re being drip-fed plot and are instead piecing together the truth yourself, and as a game it feels like you’re being treated like an adult.

Which is another pleasant thing about TNM. About as frequently as you come across a line of dialogue which falls flat you find the kind of mature writing that would raise red flags and be cut from the script of any big-budget game. Tech magazines with articles on not just how technology in the game world works, but why it supersedes previous tech. Finance periodicals describing which of Forum City’s businesses would make solid investments. Books on the history of voodoo. A character who’ll answer questions about holes in Deus Ex’s plot. An exchange about the advantages of letting your family-owned business be swallowed up by a larger corporation. A programmer talking about his hobbies. You know, boring stuff. And yet it all had me utterly rapt and was instrumental in drawing me into this world. TNM is actually eye-opening as to the kind of things the games we pay for aren’t saying due to a concern for delivering entertainment TO THE MAXIMUM. It’s a peek into a world where scriptwriters don’t care if some of what they write goes over the heads of their audience.

Which isn’t to say TNM is a stuffy, wordy thing. Just like Deus Ex all of this is optional, and the game proper offers as much exploration, stealth, murder and gun-fighting as you like. TNM even goes further by giving you access to four sliders which control player health, enemy health, and the density of both items and enemies in a level. I’d give a kidney for that final slider to be in every game ever made. I can even think of a ton of games where I’d slide it skywards.

The one criticism I’d dare to level at such a ludicrous labour of love as this is that I don’t think Off Topic Productions did all they could with this setting. A single-player game set in a pretend online virtual community is, contrary to what the team might think, a fantastic idea. It leaves the door wide open for all kinds of plot devices to do with admins breaking the rules of reality, or viruses, or people’s real lives leaking into the world, or deleting content or accounts from servers. I don’t think TNM realises its potential, and weakens itself in simultaneously trying to appease the community it came from while trying to tell a plain conspiracy story Deus Ex fans will all appreciate.

But this is only a tiny, baby criticism. As a mod TNM is proficient in execution and staggering in scale, and as an epilogue or headstone to Deus Ex it’s heart-warming. The Nameless Mod’s entire cast of characters is made up of people who adored Deus Ex enough to try and build something of their own on top of it, in the process somehow immortalizing themselves within the game they loved. It’s part tribute, part comedy, part fan-fiction and part game of its own, and it’s worth playing, to say the least.

You’ll need a copy of Deus Ex (obv), and you’ll need to download the mod itself and the 1.04 patch from here. An interview with the Chief Creative Officer of Off Topic Productions, Jonas Wæver, will be arriving on RPS a little later in the week.

Perfect op for a plug! Did an interview with the team last October, but haven’t heard anything from them since. I’m hoping it’s all still chugging along because they were a friendly bunch, but I know they’ve had their fair share of issues…

The big pain is that quite a few of the assets being made for it won’t work in TNM as almost every character and item were re-texured in TNM (meaning they’d have to be re textured again for HD versions, aka Unreal1 Engine is a bastard)

Actually almost all the HDTP items will work just fine in TNM, as will pretty much all the objects. The characters won’t work indeed, but then they only ever got a handful of those done before deciding that was going to be enough.

On the one hand, it’s always absolutely wonderful to see a huge, multiyear mod project like this actually materialize. So many mods of this sort never really reach completion, you start to think none of them will, so it’s encouraging when something like this turns out so well.

On the other hand, it’s unfortunate that it’s basically a giant in-joke, rather than something more broadly interesting.

It’s not a criticism, and certainly not a case of being “snooty” (the “snooty PC gamer” is a cliche you’re falling back on a bit too much here lately, if I may say so). I greatly respect the kind of effort and love that goes into a project like this, and the kind of commitment necessary to complete it is staggering. That said, I don’t get the sense it was made for me, I get the sense it was made for the fan community. As an “outsider” there are a lot of elements of it I’m never going to get, so the experience is fundamentally going to be diminished. That’s ok, obviously not everything needs to be made with me in mind after all, but I’m not being “snooty” by not being the target audience either.

I’m not specifically talking about you, and I’m not in the real target audience either – I wasn’t aware Deus Ex HAD a modding scene until TNM came out… and still got accused of being one of the developers for having the nerve to enjoy it, too.

There are a lot of people who have flat out refused to even read past the vague setting synopsis on this mod. Immediately turn their noses up, declare it wasted effort/retarded, and leave it at that. If that isn’t snooty, I don’t know what is.

Perhaps not, but you did respond to my post in particular so I don’t think it’s unreasonable that I assumed you WERE talking about me. :)

“and still got accused of being one of the developers for having the nerve to enjoy it”

Now see, if you want to make a point about PC gamers being elitist insular twats that’s how to do it. The “wasted effort/retarded” bit is also very strong support for your case. In fairness, though, I’m not sure that we’re really any worse as a population than any other hobbyist community. There’s a tendency for all of them to disappear up their own asses, you know?

Still, to be 100% clear, the “wasted effort/retarded” argument was in no way what I was trying to convey. It was more “darn, I wish some of the great fan projects that are directed more at me would finish as elegantly as this one has.”

It’s actually not. I ALMOST quit playing for the same reason. The problem is that the beginning of the game is full of that stuff, especially the first few conversations. After that though, most of the fiction is self-contained. You should at least try the zone past the tutorial zone (the new hub that opens after you round up the money for the subway).

FYI, notes from the creator on this:

The final and perhaps the hardest problem we faced was making people understand that our game wasn’t shit. We’d spent a lot of time making sure that people wouldn’t be alienated by our game and that we had plenty of depth and internal consistency to keep everybody interested, but we’d completely underestimated what a huge turn-off the basic idea of the mod was to so many people. Every site where we published our trailer, and every forum thread where people began to discuss the mod, one sentiment would immediately surface like a knee-jerk reflex: What an idiotic concept. Why would anybody spend seven years working on this fan-boy circle-jerk of a game?

We were pretty crestfallen. We’d gone to such lengths to make sure TNM was a game, not just a joke, and many people wouldn’t even give it a chance because they immediately assumed the worst. But to make matters worse, we came to realize that we’d frontloaded all the internet references, the fan culture and the memes and the in-jokes right in the first mission of the game.

Part of this was unavoidable. The first mission served by necessity to introduce the player to our setting, so all the opaque references and internet semiotics were presented to you immediately. Once out of the first introductory hub area, the setting would quickly slip into the back seat to leave room for the plot itself, but too many people seemed to never reach it, having lost all interest long before then. Since The Nameless Mod is free to download, we have no demo, but in terms of convincing people to invest their time in playing through TNM, that introduction area is all we have, and it seems to be doing a rather poor job.

Perhaps our greatest mistake was to tell people that The Nameless Mod was inspired by a real community that existed on the internet at one point in time. I suspect people in general would be a lot more susceptible to our quirky cyberspace setting if they thought we’d just invented it as a Snow Crash-esque sci-fi take on the internet, because then they wouldn’t associate us with the reviled genre of “forum fan fiction” to begin with, and once playing the game, they wouldn’t be expecting in-jokes everywhere. Much of the feedback we’ve received has implied that people constantly see in-jokes and obscure references when by far most of the game’s fiction was either invented specifically to suit the plot or the setting or twisted so fa

Well how much of it did you play? What you’re describing makes it sound like you didn’t get very far

I didn’t like the meta forum thing that they pushed on you in the beginning, but I kept playing and the game was great. Even if you think you won’t like it I think you owe it to yourself to get into it

“Maybe people don’t dismiss it because they are snooty, but because the plot synopsis sounds bloody awful.

The mod might not be, of course, but there it is.”

But now I think I’ll give it a try. Mod teams don’t have PR directors to see this kind of thing coming. And it’s so bloody hard to actually finish mods – the mod-game I was most looking forward to, Alien Swarm: Infested, is clearly pretty much dead, despite huge acclaim for the first Alien Swarm, and a (originally) fairly large and vibrant fanbase.

I played quite a large part of the game and then gave up. The thing I ran into again and again, is that I just didn’t care about what was happening in the story. I felt no motivation to go on these missions. It just didn’t happen for me, I guess.

Make sure you are using the newer OpenGL renderer that comes with the Nameless mod.

There are two partially completed mods that improve DX graphics in general,

HDTP for textures.
New Vision for models and other stuff.link to offtopicproductions.com — info there. I recall it was a bit tricky to get everything working with one of them, have to edit the .ini files and whatnot. The other ones just overwrites a bunch of textures and you can’t really mess it up.

You can install the beta versions of each and it improves some of the game assets.

There are some crazy advanced renderers that work with Deus Ex.
I tried this one, a pretty bug free DX10 rendere: link to kentie.net

Lastly, if you’re running at 1920 or even higher res, you probably are having problems with the font sizes. Sorry I can’t dig up a link, but there was some hack I found in the forums that did fix this.

I’ve not played it patched yet. The only thing that seriously let down the original release for me was how unfortunately broken it was in so many places.

(Stuff like plot-essential locations becoming unavailable because something I did three hours ago meant that a door didn’t unlock when it should have done. Or it crashing to desktop every time I tried to talk to a particular character.)

(Other minor quibbles included a couple of maddening difficulty spikes, and two pieces of hideous signposting – one that left me scavanging around in one building for an hour before realising I was in completely the wrong place, and another where a character basically said “So what you’re looking for is over by a wall on the other side of the city. Good luck.”)

The Nameless Mod is, of course, one of the most inspired games ever made, let alone mods. Its world is, ironically, totally convincing in every way.

For me it’s more of a “dang I wish I had been apart of the forums when this was going on so I could get the in jokes, I wish someone would make an RPS Forum based mod for a game” sort of thing :P Maybe they should gank this idea for the RPS FPS game and put a bunch of RPSians into it as characters.

Can’t wait walk into a room to find Vinraith looking into a telescope surrounding by stacks of gold bars and video games and the character is all pimped out of a gold crown and giant diamond rings, cause you know, you’re rich ;)

I’ll admit I’m also one of those “snooty PC gamers” who thinks the premise behind this mod is some LOL 4chan-ny in-joke post-modernist shite and promptly ignored it.

That said, after reading that there might actually be depth behind it, I’ll give it a shot now. I’d rather play a Deus Ex mod in the Deus Ex world setting rather than some self-referential alterna-thing though.

“Also, Alexander Brandon is back on the music for Deus Ex 3 according to IMDB, which is a recipe for absolute win. His work on soundtracks for Deus Ex, Unreal, UT, jazz Jackrabbit, etc was just fantastic.”

“Only the PC version has been announced so far. The magazine coverage we had last year were all PC: Joystick (France), PC Zone (UK), Gamestar (Germany), PC Guru (Holland), PC Powerplay (Australia), Total PC Gaming, etc. I dunno where that website is getting its info from!”

Is what the community manager has to say to this. Do I detect a hint of teasing there?

I tried this a little while ago. I sensed I might come to like it if I played it for long enough, but I stopped playing pretty soon. The setting was pretty alienating right off the bat, plus I got the sense I was feeding someone else’s internet forum power fantasy just by playing it. Or something. I don’t have a problem with in-jokes as long as they’re funny, I played all the way through something awful’s ff6 adaptation even though everyone was a forum character.

I have to admit that I had never played TNM, if not for the older article about its release here on RPS – because the synopsis was just strang. But the RPS article was just so strange that I just had to try it , and it’ awesome. I’ve only stopped halfway through, because since changing from Vista 64 to Win 7 64, Deus Ex itself crashes. Still trying to fix it every few days, failling miserably :/

So, all of you: Play this: It’s great, it’s so filled with stuff that you could aswell sell it for money. (even bought the DVD, although that won’t give the makers any money)

I thought this was miles better than the original Deus Ex in just about every area, including the setting. How are people turned off by a game about a really stretched version of online discussion about a game about clichéd conspiracy theories? No, really, that just does sound more interesting. The only problems with it were some bugs and difficulty spikes which had already been mostly patched out by the time I finished the thing. About a week and a half from release, on a mod.

Also, are people really that much more excited if Deus Ex 3 is PC-only? Weird.

“Also, are people really that much more excited if Deus Ex 3 is PC-only? Weird.”

People are still blaming ‘those damn consoles’ for Deus Ex 2 having so many problems, quietly overlooking that DX1 got a fully intact PS2 port. DX2s failure (in the eyes of fans, at least – it was a commercial success) was a mixture of poorly implemented ideas (universal ammo, for instance, worked great in Rogue Trooper), bad engine coding (no water? can’t handle areas more than a few hundred feet across?) and weak scripting. None of those are the result of it being on consoles.

I can think of a ton of games that had huuuuuuuge sprawling levels on the original Xbox/PS2. The tiny levels were a result of the engine being a bastard mutant cousin of the Unreal 2 engine that apparently nobody even at Ion Storm understood properly, as the guy who did the gruntwork on the coding left well before the game was complete.

The lack of a proper inventory? Terrible HUD and UI? Shared ammo?
Everything felt dumbed down. Whether or not it was because of the console version I guess we don’t know. I personally don’t have any trouble connecting the dots

Regardless of that specific game I think it’s safe to say that split development platforms often leads to games not really feeling native to PC. Just look at something like Borderlands

About the in jokes, they really aren’t there. Well, some of them may be there, but a lot of the things that people assume are in jokes simply are not. They are pieces of the fiction that make perfect sense in context provided you don’t assume they are in in jokes.

As an example, I have a character named after me in the mod. I wrote the lines, I recorded the lines, I had some input on what the character would look like. If there were an in-joke to be had there I assure you I would be in on it. There is no such joke. In spite of that I have seen that character denounced as an incomprehensible in joke.

No one looking at the character in isolation would objectively conclude there was an in joke. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, sometimes a long winded background character is just a long winded background character.

The thing I’ve noticed about TNM is that people tend to see in it what they expect to see. This is good if you expect to see a well crafted and internally consistent world. This is not so good if you assume that there are in jokes lurking around every corner.

The lead developer said this on the topic of in jokes:Not that I’m unbiased of course but I will say that my general impression is that people seem to assume a lot of things are in-jokes when they are, in fact, not.

[sniped examples of things people mistake for in jokes which are not]

People hear it takes place on an Internet forum and they learn that this forum actually existed once, so they assume anything they don’t immediately understand is some obscure in-joke not meant for them. In most of these cases by far, it’s not: It was just made up to add to the background fiction and flesh out the world and its characters. Whether or not it was inspired by something somebody did, said, or wrote on the PlanetDeusEx forums in april 2001 should never matter, the mod and its plot is sufficiently self-contained that you should be able to enjoy it just fine without knowing jack shit about the history of that particular corner of the Deus Ex community.

There is one last thing I’d like to say. You didn’t have to be a part of those forums to enjoy the mod. Those forums never even existed. I know this, among other reasons, because I was never a member at the same time as people like Scara. I didn’t even know there ever was a Scara; I incorrectly assumed he was a character invented for the mod. If you had to be there to enjoy this then no one would enjoy it because no one was ever there. Yet many people, most of whom have never visited the PDX forums, have enjoyed it.

The Nameless Mod is based on the PDX forums in much the same way the Hummer is based on the Model T.

Come to think of it, I should probably write a guide for how to install all of that and make it properly play together inside TNM. I’ll get right on that and will probably post it on our community wiki when it’s done.

Played it for a while. I liked it, though it wouldn’t install under wine/Linux as well as the original Deus Ex.

The concept reminded me of those .hack PS2 games. Think anime themed, story driven faux-MMORPG games. The game went to great lengths to convince you that you were really playing online, and it was relatively successful.

I want to play this (and re-play Deus Ex) but I can’t. I have 2 copies of DeusEx. They’re the old Mac version. There was never an OSX version, let alone an intel native one. Anyone know if you can crib the executable part (but that’s the scary/dangerous part to obtain unofficially) to use w/ the mac-provided assets? (Should be the same)

Once i’ve finished Dragon Age, Arkham Asylim, Bioshock and Crysis i promise I’ll get round to playing this!

It’s taken a while for the positive press about this game to chip away at my preconceptions that a game based around a forum is just going to be shit (even if I did occasionally frequent said forum) but I think this last article has just about done it.

I will give it a go and from what has been written about it I’m fairly sure i’ll enjoy it – I’ll certainly go in with an open mind. But if the story doesn’t grab then it’ll all be over!

I played it without knowing about the whole “Community Forum” setting and was so completely turned off after a few minutes of playing that I didn’t care to continue. It felt like one huge inside joke that I wasn’t getting.

@ Max: Sorry to hear that, and far be it for me to tell you what to like, however once you get involved in the story the inside joke thing is of no consequence. Honestly, if you like Deus Ex then there’s every chance you will like TNM as well.

As I recall, when I needed to replace my copy of Deus Ex it cost 50 cents (US currency.) Of course shipping was $3.49 so it came out to about $4. The price appears to have gone up since then, with a new copy of the game costing 99 cents on Amazon with shipping at an outrageously high $3.99. That means it costs 16.6% of every penny you have.

Of course given the way Amazon Merchants work it could cost several times that by the time anyone reads this.

Two things: crawling in the vent behind the desk at the hotel(?) where you start gets you shot by police.

And: when you log into a computer, as well as email there’s an ‘apps’ button. Click on it, and you can play Breakout, Tetris, and IRC Client. Click on IRC Client (and then tell Zonealarm that tnm.exe is friendly) and you connect to the game’s IRC channel, from within the game interface..! Awesome.

Installing this mod will not stop you from playing Deus Ex normally. Installing will create a shortcut that will start The Nameless Mod. You use that to play TNM, starting Deus Ex regularly will give you the unaltered Deus Ex that you know and love.